It’s only a moment. Giselle, a migrant seamstress made rootless by a changing world, confronts the dauntingly affluent Bathilde. Their encounter ripples with instinctive distrust (unwittingly, each loves the same guy; this is ballet). Bathilde wears sumptuous black, plume-topped and lace-swathed. Giselle is in faded blue (washed out and washed again) – but she won’t simper, won’t sink in subservience. Instead, she reaches out and rubs the filigree lace work on Bathilde’s dress.

Giselle recognises this extraordinary work – because it’s her own. She made this elaborate lace. Privilege depends on labour like hers, and she knows exactly what it’s worth – and what she’s worth too. It’s just a moment – but a moment of electric disillusion that suggests how radically Akram Khan’s new Giselle for English National Ballet departs from the 1841 original.

A dress caress also figures in the Romantic scenario, but that Giselle is a sheltered country girl dazzled by an aristocratic hunting party. She naively touches Bathilde’s dress because she’s never seen anything so beautiful. Alina Cojocaru’s steely gamine, Khan’s Giselle at the premiere this autumn, would find awe undignified – glamour casts no spell over her, because she knows precisely what it costs, and how cheap labour sustains it.

Khan and his collaborators have thoroughly rethought Giselle. It’s still the story of a poor woman played false by a rich man; it still follows her death and fateful encounters in the afterlife. It still contrasts innocence and experience, love and expediency, the bed and the grave – but redraws the trajectory between those coordinates. Giselle isn’t a peasant, but one of the migrant garment workers brought to a foreign factory then stranded when it closes (because: globalisation). Albrecht (Isaac Hernández) fancies an escape from the elite and enjoys teasing duets with Giselle, but doesn’t have the courage to make the break. In Tim Yip’s design, the wall that divides rich and poor, living and dead, is no metaphor, but a vast, tilting structure that segregates by income (and, later, by pulse).

Bathilde (Begoña Cao) and her fellow landlords emerge from behind the wall, almost grotesque in cold silver light. Yip designs them outlandish silhouettes – women marooned by their pannier skirts and millinery, frockcoated dandies who eye up the migrant talent. The indigent workers don’t dance for joy – they dance to please, to turn defiant dance into entertainment for the toffs.

Touch has a precise, searing value in this world. There are handprints in the wall – testament to anxious, insistent humanity – and Giselle presses her own hands into them, presses Albrecht’s too. He doesn’t know what that desperation feels like – and Hilarion (Cesar Corrales’ snake-hipped broker between the worlds of need and privilege) catches him not feeling it. Touch might also mark the reality of Giselle and Albrecht’s relationship: when she understands how his background pulls him back, Cojocaru puts her hand to his face – as if to prove she knows him, knows his warmth, through her flesh and down to the bone. We hear an awful crackle in the score, as if of a radio signal fading out of range.

Touch says: we’re here. Touch says: this is now. When it becomes clear that touch has lost its truth, that Albrecht is withdrawing, Giselle unravels, falling in a broken spiral. Everything disperses: the workers move on, pounding, slanting, making for more welcoming territory. Khan and co define a terrifyingly rootless world in which nothing is stable, in which touch is fleeting.

Giselle dies and joins the shades of workers left behind in the ghost factory, its light chocked with dust. Like their classical ballet counterparts, they teeter on pointe – never to feel again the slap of sole on soil. Cojocaru registers her reluctance to learn the ways of this cold, stiff world – she lunges, thrashes, flings back her head. When Albrecht appears, she stares down the dead, restores a sense of terror to Giselle’s unfinished business. The lovers touch – but do they feel each other’s press on face and breast, or is it just a memory of weight and warmth? The dancers seem to drift through each other; arms fall away even as they reach out. We’re a long way from Giselle feeling a dress and knowing its history and her own. Touch says: I know this world. Touch says: know me. When touch falls away, so does all comfort.

Shakespeare’s Globe yesterday released a baffling public statement. It praised Emma Rice, its new artistic director, for the creative, critical and commercial success of her first season, her achievement in attracting new, diverse audiences. And then it sacked her. Rice will lead one more season, and then she goes – taking, the open-air theatre has decreed, her ‘designed sound and light rigging’ with her.

Yes, Rice has brought assertive light and sound to her season – also, a political edge, a sharper sense of colour-blind and gender-disruptive casting. It’s hard not to credit that these qualities have also disturbed some among the Globe’s council and existing audiences. Another nasty woman is pushed aside.

The Globe’s programming, we’re told, ‘should be structured around “shared light” productions’, to ‘explore the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked.’ We’re back, dismayingly, to assessing theatre on the grounds of authenticity – the least useful, least lucid marker for theatrical value. Authentic early-modern staging, in the 21st century? When artists and audiences alike bring their contemporary selves to the performance, in the middle of contemporary London and its thrusting city skyline? That’s an authentic impossibility.

The Globe’s prime function is surely to make a case for the power of these texts and the stories they can tell. In this, Rice has succeeded big time. Her own production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the deserved headline hit of the season – bold, irreverent, entertaining, and with an unusual emotionally generous sense of relationship. Matthew Dunster’s Cymbeline (renamed Imogen after its heroine) may have been the gangsta reboot that broke the council’s resolve – but though it scythed back ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ and had the cast bursting with joy to Skepta, it also told the story with unusual verve and clarity. It wasn’t romantic, but it was a bloody good thriller.

Macbeth didn’t work – but it’s a play that too rarely does. The most radical argument with the source text was also the genuine revelation of the season – Caroline Byrne’s The Taming of the Shrew, which (as I wrote here), took that unlovely so-called comedy by the scruff of its misogynistic neck and shook it till it snarled. Gender and class had the charm scraped off them, and revealed a tough, horrible, fascinating play about lack of choice in a bottom-line world. It will be difficult to think of the play in future without factoring in its findings – and few Shakespeare productions can lay claim to that.

Save us from shouting

As Matt Trueman argues, this decision has to be about more than lighting. The Globe has always lit its evening performances (and I’ve always enjoyed these far more than those blanched by the afternoon’s glare and confusion). Adding neon – even the cheery ‘Rock the ground’ that greeted Dreamers this season – doesn’t guarantee radicalism. But productions which grasp for original practices must work hard to resist a retrograde bias. All-male productions have often been good on male power games but dismaying when treating gender (I don’t miss Propellor’s screeching travesty heroines). When women play men (Michelle Terry’s Henry V, Harriet Walter’s Prospero, the women playing servants in Byrne’s Shrew), they take things far more seriously. Save us from a return to the Globe’s shouty first seasons, horribly coarse and musky.

The statement by CEO Neil Constable suggests the Globe reconstruction was a ‘radical experiment’ and that a change of direction will enable it ‘to optimise further experimentation in our unique theatre spaces and the playing conditions which they offer.’ The candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, its indoor space, has certainly been transformative for thinking anew about Jacobean drama, its strange and shivery intensities. Scholars will have their say, but the large outdoor theatre to me represents an experiment beyond historical inquiry – an experiment into popular theatre, an oxymoron no more. Successive seasons have learned how to make the groundlings standing in front of the stage its beating heart – building a gaggle of bardheads, tourists, students and newbies into a play’s vigorously responsive sounding board. If being there sometimes felt like confected panto in the early years, we now test, embrace, argue back against the productions. They have become more supple, more sophisticated and more fun with each passing season, and Rice’s season drove that dynamic forward.

The Globe often attracts mixed reviews – the balance between fusty and populist, crude and timid is likely to be more keenly contested than in most theatres – but Rice’s productions weren’t the first to push far beyond original practice. Vanessa Redgrave played Prospero; Mike Alfreds’ small cast productions (of, yes, Dream and Cymbeline) brought the ethos of specific storytelling in an abstract setting that he’d developed with Shared Experience. The stage was thrust into the yard, the marble-patterned pillars covered up. The Globe to Globe season featured a gamut of international companies taking a gamut of inauthentic approaches to the canon.

Tom Cornford has argued forcefully that the criticism of Rice was primarily misogynist. I’m not wholly convinced – but have no doubt that what seemed admirably maverick in the theatre’s previous male leaders (Dominic Dromgoole, an enthusiastic controversialist; Mark Rylance, sweetly wittering about ley lines and denying Shakespeare’s authorship) can still seem beyond the pale for a woman. Rice’s initial remarks about finding Shakespeare baffling and alienating did her few favours, and may have left the Globe’s existing audiences behind – but would they have seemed more charming in a bloke?

That Rice still feels able to programme a ‘Summer of Love’ next year shows admirable optimism and resilience. If Shakespeare productions are once again the ground on which to contest what theatre is for – a backward-looking diversion or an engagement with the world, or as Cornford argues, ‘a culture war by the privileged against those they want to keep out’ – then the Globe’s decision is authentically dismaying.

The past is another country: they drink things differently there. After the gin-marinated 1950s of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, this week I hit the whisky: in the 1960s Connecticut of The Red Barn and then with the 1970s Hampstead topers in Pinter’s No Man’s Land.

Gin, in Osborne’s play, is predominantly a woman’s tipple: mother’s ruin, and the ruin of Archie’s maudlin wife Phoebe, loosening her maundering tongue. Whisky, on the other hand – that’s a man’s drink, and couldn’t be better chosen to run through two plays about masculinity queasily asserting itself.

Strong plays weak

The Red Barn at the National Theatre is David Hare’s adaptation of La Main by Georges Simeon, in which a man’s life swirls out of kilter after his friend disappears in a rural snowstorm. Characters reach for the amber stuff in extremis, pouring another finger of poor judgement. Police lieutenant arrives in search of your friend, missing-presumed-dead? Offer him a drink, and when he gives you the fish-eye, have one yourself. Fetching up for an affair at the widow’s apartment? You could surely use a whisky. The lady has one too? Watch yourself, buddy, you’re in dangerous waters.

Robert Icke’s production fairly shines with masculinity’s fragile veneer. It may look chic with Mad Men assurance – the tailoring, grooming and swinging furnishings – but the male who negotiates this environment is far from alpha. Icke’s coup is casting Mark Strong as Donald, a lawyer sinking in a life half-lived. Strong plays weak, a mighty actor cast for frailty. Last seen on stage compact with hair and muscle as raging Eddie in A View From the Bridge, Strong (photo above by Manuel Harlan) here blinks in specs and a suit. His stillness is paralysis; his eyes aren’t like tunnels but lost holes in the snow. He’s always out-foxed.

Bunny Christie’s fantastic set – a variation on the cinematic moving shutters of her Baby Doll some years ago – means the play keeps its counsel. No one gets full perspective, all views are partial, shifting and liable to close down at alarming speed. Donald – the good husband, father, friend, adviser – sees less than anyone, and pours away his reputation. Scotch doesn’t ruin him, but alongside lust and lost ambition, it’s another occluding lens through which he miss-sees. When Mona (Elizabeth Debicki), the lost friend’s widow, joins him in a post-coital glass, the amber fluid stands out in her chic white apartment, signalling caution: beware the woman with a man’s drink. (Simenon’s period sirens often activate a male impulse to self-sabotage.)

This Propwatch series is mildly obsessed by onstage catering, whether a celebratory cake or solitary fried egg. No apologies for that – we are how we eat, and these choices can reveal a character. Take Donald’s wife Ingrid (Hope Davis, unnervingly poised). Even in the midst of a snowstorm, a power failure and a man hunt, she nonetheless emerges with a platter of perfect sandwiches, neat triangles with the crusts cut off. No wonder Donald clings to and chafes at his marriage.

What does stage management use for scotch? Tea and toast can both do the job. It’s probably just as well in No Man’s Land (Wyndhams Theatre), where much drink is consumed. And I mean much. Pinter states that the drinks cabinet is ‘the central feature’ of the set, with its ‘great variety of bottles: spirits, aperitifs, beers, etc.’ Those bottles get a good going over during the course of the play, from the first ‘As it is?’ to the last ‘I’ll drink to that.’ In the first act alone I counted four vodkas and a bottle of beer, alongside at least ten glasses of whisky, until Hirst the host (Patrick Stewart, quietly stocious) loses patience with small measures and demands to swig from the bottle. His intrusive guest, Spooner (Ian McKellen, pictured above by Kevin Berne) attempts to make coffee, but that doesn’t get very far. Champagne makes an entrance in the second act, and Spooner’s wheedling anecdotes include a Hungarian emigré on Pernod and his own extensive wine tours around Dijon.

The company of men

But whisky, ‘the great malt which wounds,’ will put the man in man of letters. McKellen’s acute sensitivity to the whereabouts of the bottle becomes the defining note of his first act. However bleary, he keeps it in his sights, weaving over to the cabinet in hope of a refill, eyes wide in expectation, cheeks sagging in disappointment. Whisky becomes a physical challenge too: as he weaves back and forth in his grubby plimsolls, he keeps his mac folded over his arm – he’s clearly accustomed to being asked to get his coat – and eases the tumbler from one hand to the other as he tries to maintain a wordly monologue. When he then tucks the bottle under one arm, he’s on the verge of juggling. Spooner is a man who needs to improvise on the fly, and who grabs a whisky while he can.

We’re in the company of men here. Boasting, bullying, angling for a job, laying claims to status. Women only feature in hazy recall: wives, lovers (these usually other men’s wives), the odd emotionally ambivalent mother with a gift for currant buns. But there are only men in no man’s land. A calcified state ‘which never moves, which never changes… but which remains for ever, icy and silent.’ Heavy curtains drawn tight, even on a summer’s morning. Men stuck with themselves, pickled. Hand on glass, now and forever. ‘A drop for you, sir?’

When the great Victorian actor Ellen Terry was preparing to play Ophelia, she visited a London asylum to observe young women who might unlock the character. However, the madwomen were, she wrote, useless for research: ‘too theatrical.’

The interplay between playhouse and madhouse is a theme running unobtrusively through much of Bedlam, a fascinating exhibition at the invaluable Wellcome Collection, on the history of British asylums through London’s notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital, which in various incarnations during the past 350 years has moved from confinement to therapy, from display to sanctuary.

The exhibition also reminds you of theatre’s lost centrality to British culture. Writers, professionals, inmates could all conceive of themselves in theatrical terms, because theatre was a readily available metaphor for everything. Madness cavorted happily onto the stage during the 17th century, when it seemed less a medical condition than a state of moral or passionate imbalance. Original playtexts by Ford (The Lover’s Melancholy) and Dekker (The Honest Whore), are juxtaposed with a modern poster for The Changeling showing a bifurcated heroine. Lover might shade into lunatic; the jittering madhouse was a barely distorted reflection of the claustrophobic Jacobean court.

A permanent stage

The Restoration’s Bedlam built in Moorfields looked as handsomely baroque as the new theatres in Drury Lane and Haymarket. A poem marking its opening in 1676 compared it favourably to the pyramids and praised its ascent from the ‘funeral ashes’ of London’s Great Fire. Set in genteel grounds, its paths lined with sedately uniform trees, the building slotted into the capital’s new culture of leisure, where the rapidly expanding city was a permanent stage. Inmates were confined rather than cured, and their distress was put on display for a paying audience. Hogarth’s rake ends in the madhouse, where fashionable ladies pass smilingly through the unhappy inhabitants.

Bedlam’s elegant exterior contained chaos – and as maintenance was neglected, the institution’s façade came to figure its misery. An engraving from 1812 shows crumbling brickwork, overgrown vegetation, while unseen inmates dandle a sheet or crucifix from the windows. Three years later, a House of Commons report exposed an abusive regime, including one inmate, James Norris, who for 10 years was chained to a wall by his neck: ‘more from feelings of revenge than for purposes of medical cure.’

This report, which prompted a move to a new building in Southwark, marked a shift in fictional depictions of insanity – from the public behaviours of the theatre to the interior spaces of the novel. Charlotte Brontë, Dickins and Wilkie Collins all described institutions inadequate to the needs of the vulnerable (young, poor, insane). But theatre was still current in the way people thought of themselves. The exhibition includes an incredible series of petitions stitched like samplers in a Wakefield asylum by Mary Frances Heaton. The lucid needlework – underlinings done in neat red thread – describes tangled conspiracy theories, and foregrounds her early exposure to Racine. His tragedy Esther, she argues, has a ‘curious resemblance’ to several ‘remarkable events of my life.’

Drama might form part of a therapeutic regime – an 1843 poster from the Crichton Royal institution announces that the farce Monsieur Tonson by WT Moncrieff will be performed ‘by the Corpus Dramatique of the above Establishment!!!!’ But if earlier playwrights had drawn on the distracted for dramatic effect, their characters formed a frame for thinking about the insane. Sweetly distracted Ophelia provided a model for maddened Victorian femininity: one doctor wrote ‘every mental physician of moderately extensive experience must have seen many Ophelias.’ Hugh Welch Diamond, a superintendent at the Surrey County Asylum in the 1850s, was also a photographic pioneer who used his patients as subjects. One inmate (pictured above) is styled as Ophelia – wrapped in a picturesque shawl, her hair garlanded with leaves. Ellen Terry might have found her too theatrical – or, at least, too conventionally theatrical.

The exhibition includes arrange of works produced by patients – portraits by Richard Dadd and Van Gogh that turn their gaze on their doctors, or an elegant proposal for the Southwark Bedlam by an inmate in the hospital. A century on, there is one of Nijinsky’s paintings (above) – the unmatched dancer creating an anguished face, swirled in blue and red pastels.

If the Wellcome exhibition is any guide, performance as mask or mirror no longer seems a helpful model to today’s mad doctors. Theatre as metaphor may have lost its cultural currency. Those of us for whom distress feels like being miscast in a role, shoved into a play we don’t quite comprehend without a script, or stumbling before the public without a safety net, may disagree.

I rarely meet a revival I don’t like. Classic plays are good for thinking: they re-reveal themselves in each new production, and choices in text and staging function as a conversation between a past and present moment – whether sympathetic discussion or knockdown argument.

And then comes Rob Ashford’s benighted retread of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which doesn’t so much converse with the play as let it drone on, uninterrupted and unquestioned, burying its cast and stultifying its audience.

Before I rant, a big old disclaimer. I can only discuss the first half of the show, because, very unusually, I bailed at the interval. I wasn’t on professional duty, I’d paid for my tickets, so felt no obligation to stay. My pal last walked out of a play in 1978 (the premiere of Plenty – she still can’t forgive David Hare), but also longed to make a dash for freedom.

Premiered in 1957, the play starred Laurence Olivier, famously reinventing himself as Archie Rice, a failing comic in the dying days of music hall. Archie’s act trumpets tatty patriotism and hetero-lechery, but his miserable family life exposes how out of step with the times these values feel. His act dwindles, his family fractures. The empire crumbles just as everytown’s Empire Theatres fall dark.

It’s a verbose play, and needs a production that talks back. Ashford, however, is a workmanlike director who doesn’t add anything interesting to a play, just helps it trundle from curtain up to curtain down without falling over. But The Entertainer isn’t neatly self-sufficient. Why disinter it? The revival, announced over a year ago, has coincided with Britain once again ingloriously losing its place in the world – but Brexit schmexit, there’s no insight into what that feels like. Osborne mouths the change, but doesn’t embed it: ‘his narrative technique hardly exists,’ noted the New Statesman in 1957. Rattigan, supposedly knocked off his perch by Osborne’s rise, can be equally conservative and sentimental. But juxtaposing this revival with The Deep Blue Sea at the National makes it clear that while Osborne’s subject matter (sex and socialism) may have been unusually forthright, his style now seems stale (grinding exposition, drip-drip secrets, slap-across-the-chops symbolism).

Sitting at the very back of the Garrick stalls, squinting between heads at the slumberous proscenium, feels like peering back through time to a distillation of 1950s West End mediocrity. People move only when they speak, fossilise when silent. None of the Rice family behave as if they’ve met before (smart cookie Greta Scacchi, playing boozy and blowsy; poor Sophie McShera, squeaking politely through the pallid role of Archie’s daughter). Christopher Oram’s lovingly textured backstage set – such care to make something look so shabby – turns the domestic interactions into overcooked routines. Big speeches whomp out front, while Archie’s gruesome act plays like a whimpering series of little deaths.

‘I have a go, lady’

The play wasn’t written for Olivier, but if biographers tell true he was perfect casting. Olivier was Archie Rice: vain, protective, vulnerable, a family man without loyalty, an actor most alive onstage. The only difference – a huge one – is that Olivier had talent.

We’re often told that Kenneth Branagh trots in Olivier’s footsteps (Henry V, multiple Hamlets, the last of the actor-managers), but he’s a very different kind of actor. As Matt Trueman suggests, he retains an enduring innocence, parlaying roles through a warmth and integrity, rather than bending them to his chameleon will.

Given the famous Tynan review of Olivier, it’s a surprise to find Archie’s ailing shtick less prominent than the mithering family drama. Branagh can’t find a plausible take on Rice’s act. The evening begins with a smoke-lit tap number surrounded by willowy dancers: does Archie think of himself as Gene Kelly doing Slaughter on 10th Avenue? But the idea is dropped, as Branagh lobs everything he has – guile and sinew, moue and muscle – into the leaden patter, dotted with Osborne’s cringey flounces of homosexual panic. Is Rice a swivel-hipped hoofer who has lost his way? A no-hoper slogging through a no-hope medium? A satirist revealing truths through inadequacy? This Archie isn’t dead behind the eyes, but blinking in panic as nothing he tries makes sense.

Branagh is the wrong kind of overbearing, but it’s not that you don’t believe in Archie’s act, it’s that both chat and songs have too much point, and none at all. They have to embody small-minded Englishness (it’s like watching Nigel Farage’s warm-up act), but convince that there’s a kind of nobility in the mere attempt to entertain. ‘To carry on like this, year after year,’ wrote the critic Harold Hobson of the first production, ‘is also a form of heroism.’ Or, as Archie likes to chirrup, ‘I have a go, lady.’

How heroic is it to carry on without the faintest idea why? That’s post-Suez and Brexit all over, I suppose. Masculine self-pity refuses to go out of fashion – and has rarely sounded less appealing than here.

In John Tiffany’s absorbing production of The Glass Menagerie (seen in New York in 2013, now playing at the Edinburgh International Festival), isolation is a defining note. The Wingfield family’s St Louis apartment is lapped by inky water, so that the rooms appear like islands. They’re marooned.

The Wingfields are feely – so much feely – but rarely touchy. Cherry Jones’ mother cajoles and commands; Kate O’Flynn’s sister halts and hides away. Neither gets huggy with Michael Esper’s Tom, their respective son and brother. Tom, also the play’s narrator, shares a firstname with Tennessee Williams, and is usually read as an autobiographical extension of the playwright. If the writer is gay, what of the character? Only when Seth Numrich’s buoyant gentleman caller arrives, unaware that he has been set up as a suitor for sister, does the production belatedly allow physical contact. He and Tom slap each othr on the back, rest hands on each other’s shoulders. It’s a dude’s horseplay, but each touch registers the homoerotic desire that the play overtly avoids.

It’s a subtle note in the production, but a vital one. All the characters but Tom are placed in a romantic frame, discussing relationships past, present and potential. But what of Tom? Desire ripples through his speeches on the hot music spilling out of the dancehall, on the restless call of the sea to which he eventually succumbs. And it’s there, surely, in Williams’ own biography, a catalogue of brave relationships and brazen hook-ups. Without strain, Tiffany’s production restores Williams’ homosexuality to his breakthrough hit, makes sense of a loquacious character who doesn’t quite explain himself.

Twenty years ago, queering the canon was all the rage. In Shakespeare, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida would seem unabashedly erotic, while the characters of Antonio (in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice) would be shown in complicated thrall to fickle younger men. Filmed by Derek Jarman, staged by Gerard Murphy, Edward II challenged Dr Faustus to be considered Marlowe’s most pertinent tragedy. Queer subtexts were unearthed beneath the heterosexual mechanism of The Importance of Being Earnest, and the relationship between Leo and Otto in Coward’s Design for Living seemed erotically charged.

Theatre has always been a queer medium. Even early modern moralists recognised the perverse potential in the assuming of roles, playing at gender, releasing a desirous frisson into an audience. Yet the canon’s plots remain apparently heteronormative: rewarding with marriage, punishing with death and disgrace.

Finding alternative pathways through these plays was a political project from the late 1980s onwards. It asserted that gays were always there, reclaimed some of Eng Lit’s most revered writers for a new canon. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not stepping out of the spotlight.

Supernatural perversity

Post reforms to marriage and military in the west, is there a concerted political project now? The new queering of classics seems more concerned with reframing the texts to point up something that was always there. The lost-in-the-woods, supernatural perversity of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream is pure wild and whirling – so it always seems peculiar that its perversity clings to straight couplings. Making lovelorn Helena into gay Helenus, as director Emma Rice does at Shakespeare’s Globe, unlocks the play’s unpredictable tangles of emotion.

It seems like the year of Terence Rattigan, but this gay writer mostly wrote straight (in an anguished sort of a way). You might argue that only a semi-outsider’s eye could delineate so sharply the chasms of marriage and misplaced affection. But Paul Miller’s delightful revival of his early farce, French Without Tears, is piqued by men being largely bewildered by women, and clinging together for homosocial warmth.

Just as Tiffany does with Tennessee Williams, these productions present (male, still) homosexuality as the new normal: more remarkable in its absence than presence. An implicitly gay Tom Wingfield doesn’t shake up the play, or shove it into a new shape: he just helps us recognise it. I sometimes miss, I’ll admit, the old anger and defiance, but maybe gay normcore is welcome?

What do you do when the world is broken? You can do worse than laugh. My usual taste is for dystopia, plays for endtimes that will sob you to sleep. I don’t go to the theatre to enjoy myself, thankyouverymuch, I get enough of that at home. And yet, a brief scurry through the Edinburgh Fringe unexpectedly skewed towards the bright – raucous, ramshackle theatre which took on alienation and austerity through the medium of chuckle.

Shôn Dale-Jones, the Welsh theatremaker who often appears as his alter ego Hugh Hughes, works where whimsy meets integrity. The Duke, his solo Edinburgh show (Hoipolloi at the Pleasance) is about mid-career disappointment, about gestures that attempt to repair hurt and ameliorate pain. Shôn’s mother, he tells us, has broken a figurine of the Duke of Wellington – her late husband’s prize possession – and spins a shaggy-dog story about replacing it. A cop turned porcelain collector; a mysterious aged benefactor; a gaggle of pals and a treasure hunt and a car chase. It’s a cockle-warming British comedy right there.

At the same time, Dale-Hughes struggles to turn his fantasy script about the island of Anglesey into a bankable screenplay. Each of the producer’s sweeping, mandatory changes (it’s fine, but Anglesey must become Manhattan) represents a pummelling compromise. (I hope it’s not a betrayal to suspect that a hard-nosed movie producer may be right to doubt the commercial potential of Shôn’s dream project).

Storytelling is a community-building medium – it feels personal – and narrating the show from behind a table, Dale-Hughes is a charmer, though his pre-show banter reveals a spikier persona than his eager grin suggests. He’s a dreamer, but not a fool – and he wants to do the right thing. To make his ma happy, to make work he can be proud of, to gather a community of friends and, most ambitiously, to help refugee children arriving in Europe. He manages to tie those threads together and finally to make a practical contribution to the vast problems he identifies. Tickets are free, but audiences are invited to donate to Save the Children (‘I wanted to make a piece of work that is as tangibly helpful as possible, and which has a real and concrete function,’ he has said). The Duke won’t mend the world (compensate for a lost husband and father, transform his career or solve the refugee crisis); but it may recalibrate our resolve to make it slightly better.

If you can’t change the world, run away to the movies. Welsh playwright Alan Harris’ Love, Lies and Taxidermy (Summerhall; produced by Paines Plough, Sherman Theatre and Theatr Clwyd) is a cheerfully ramshackle romance set in Merthyr Tydfil. No one mentions austerity, but they don’t need to: in Merthyr (aka ‘a shithole’), Tesco squats in the centre of town like a behemoth, wiping out trade for Mr Tutti Frutti’s ice cream van. Aspirations are squeezed, and although the register is that of a caper (plotlines revolve around amateur porn, the world’s smallest cinema, a stuffed owl that conceals a stash of cash), the context is economic gloom. Hiding out at Titanic or Pretty Woman seems plausible.

Harris writes dialogue with bounce and some great gags. A cute cast (Remy Beasley, Richard Corgan and Andy Rush) play multiple roles, interrupt their own and others’ lines with quippish commentary, skip away from solemnity. The play is eager to please as a waggy-tailed dog, though its scamper to the finish line runs out of steam – the drawback of the fringe’s standard 60-minute format, which cubes everything into breathless anecdote.

Rancid absurdity

Weirdly, the plot also hangs on the local branch of the Conservative Party – very much supporting players in Wales, which suggests (to be portentous) how little credit Harris gives mainstream politics as an agent of change. The same is true, times loads, in Sh!t Theatre’s Letters To Windsor House(Summerhall), a piece made from and about the performers’ illegally sublet, supposedly former council flat. Like so many London districts, Manor House is being viciously gentrified and economically cleansed. It may sound appealingly rustic, they point out, but Manor House, was named after a long-gone pub. Their block, Windsor House is one of four named for royal residences (alongside Buckingham, Balmoral, Holyrood) which represents either wishful thinking or bitter irony.

Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole are young theatremakers who inhabit a landscape of straightened opportunities. They’re immensely pragmatic. They don’t sentimentalise about community past or present. They don’t know their neighbours – hell, they don’t always like each other very much. They don’t expect much can change – instead they get stuck into the rancid absurdity of ads for upscale housing developments (images of Harrods brazenly included), pulled between city slickery and fake arcadia. Of council helplines who shy away from investigating fraud (‘In all fairness, that could be you someday’). Of the income-sucking rental market that seems to squash any chance of them moving on from their deathtrap flat. It’s a London that is heartsinkingly familiar.

Their rage is subsumed in facepaint, selections from Oliver!, cutprice disco lights and a witty rummage through mail addressed to the flat’s former tenants. This, the show’s enticing hook, is a bit lacklustre – they try a bit of a Google, a flirt with Facebook, but don’t turn up anything wildly exciting about their predecessors. Only a bloke who incongruously received catalogues for baby products piques their interest and gets them investigating/stalking, not to mention composing an alarmingly infectious ditty (‘Rob Jeacock is an adult baby!’). Sh!t Theatre have little faith that they can either change the world, or avoid it. How long will their sharp, harsh enjoyment of it last?

Go down in flames

If the world won’t support you, you might as well go down in flames. Seiriol Davies fashions a surprising and continuously delightful show from the biographical remnants of Henry Paget, fifth Marquis of Anglesey, a glitteringly fey Edwardian who lived lavish, died young, and was scrubbed from the records by his appalled descendants. How To Win Against History at Assembly George Square makes him a musical (a grand opera might be more fitting, but harder to achieve in a three-man show in a hot little theatre – ‘our microwave’).

After years in which Eton chaps have ruled us or parlayed their grinding snobbery into our so-called entertainment (bloody bloody Julian Fellowes), then there’s something pleasing in seeing their entitlement turned upon them. In some ways, Henry refuses all the rules of his class: he razes the chapel to build a theatre; embarks upon a paper marriage and a ruinous career; dies at 29 in Monte Carlo. But at the same time, he takes that sense of entitlement and runs with it: he sings and dances and wears epaulettes and sequins and ribbons all at once, because he’s a marquis and who’s going to say anything? This is the spirit that won, and lost, an empire, with added eyeliner.

Davies and his collaborators give it a musical register that veers between X-Factor confessional falsetto and Gilbert and Sullivan patter; a dance vocab that’s all scoosh across the stage and trembles on the brink of jazzhands; a performance style that is unerringly wide-eyed, beaming sweetly at disaster. Davies whittles down his voice to a quiet, sad refrain beginning ‘Regrettably’ whenever the Marquis makes a misstep (regrettably often). The paucity of surviving fact means that the production can shove speculation into a sparkly outfit and make it sing. It’s an act of defiance that refuses a straightened world’s rules of conduct. The show becomes a fopulent treat, a reminder that while history is written by the winners it can be sung by the fabulous defeated.

When archaeologists excavating a Leicestershire car park in 2013 uncovered a battle-scarred skeleton, the emergence of its severely curved spine was the first strong indication that these were the remains of Richard III: England’s most notorious monarch, Shakespeare’s irredeemable villain. Further research and DNA testing supported the archaeologists’ theory: hitting a nerve at the juncture of history and myth.

The spine spirals like half the twist of the DNA double helix – Richard III’s identity is half anatomy, half imagination. Rupert Goold’s production of Shakespeare’s history play at the Almeida Theatre begins with that present-day dig, and a protective-suited boffin holds up the spine in a wondering spotlight before Ralph Fiennes steps forward to put flesh on those bones: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer…’

Goold and his designer Hildegard Bechtler don’t dress the play in medieval clobber. The costumes are recent, while the throne, skulls, chainmail curtain aren’t specific to Plantagenet Britain. And yet the prologue drawn from recent headlines, the archaeological-pit-cum-open-grave that remains centre stage, insist that this Richard III is serving up a kind of realness. The ‘authenticity’ of the spine reinforces the authenticity of the behaviour we observe: the politics of masculine ambition, coercion and domination.

Anatomy isn’t identity

What did the Leicester skeleton reveal about Richard? That he did not have a hunchback or a withered arm (Fiennes pulls off his glove to reveal a pitted, leprous-white paw), but a severely curved spine. Mike Pitts in Digging for Richard III reports the researchers’ belief that he developed adolescent-onset scoliosis (rare in males) in early adolescence. The twisted ribcage may have squeezed his lungs, and his height would probably have been reduced to below five feet.

Anatomy isn’t identity, but it might give more credence to the words of Richard’s near contemporaries. Pitts quotes the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil’s description of the king’s ‘short and sour countenance, which seemed to savour of mischief,’ his habit of chewing his lower lip ‘as if the savage nature in that tiny body was raging against itself.’

Ralph Fiennes as Richard. Photo: Alastair Muir

For Shakespeare, Richard’s deformity indicates a warp of body and mind alike. Different productions play it up or down. Antony Sher’s roiling, bunched shoulders, looming above spindled legs on crutches. Ian McKellen’s Mosleyite rigidity. Mark Rylance’s simpleton-turned-Stalin (Richard as Keyser Söze). Hans Kesting’s blotched face and staggering gate for Toneelgroep’s Kings of War. Fiennes and Goold, however, pin their Richard’s disability to historical fact – this villain isn’t a horrorshow nightmare but an observable political reality.

Fiennes uses it brilliantly to disconcert, rapidly swivelling up and under to peer at a nervous interlocutor. A mere turn of the shoulders can invade a rival’s personal space, allowing him to cultivate a disconcerting sense of movement within stillness. Feet planted on the ground, his glare can arrive at speed and alarmingly close (Fiennes’ eyes freeze over whenever he hears something he doesn’t like – teasing from the young princes, Buckingham’s unwary adjective ‘effeminate’). The condition isn’t exploited for gothick yuks, but as he kneels at his coronation we register the knobbled curl of bones through his tight black top.

Reality bites

Is this the spine of the story, the key to the character? Fiennes, whose strongest midlife performances (Grand Budapest Hotel, A Bigger Splash) have shown him letting rip, is here seethingly contained; his focus is on emotional rather than physical trauma. This Richard is uncaring, but also uncared for. The scenes with his mother, often sidelined, are prominent in Susan Engel’s patrician bewildered towards her own son. Richard’s problems with women are his problems with a world that can’t love him, that he can’t love but can only subdue. In a large cast, the female characters are the most interesting because they see through him, talk truth to tyranny. The men are too invested in the game: vainglorious Hastings (James Garnon), scrolling through his email and missing a gathering coup; canny Buckingham (Finbar Lynch), who finds that even treading carefully won’t wash with a boss who doesn’t care.

Some commentators recoil from the production’s notes of sexual violence – this Richard clamps a hand between Anne’s legs as he proposes marriage, rapes Elizabeth while demanding that she persuade her daughter to become his second wife. These are horrible scenes, but embedded in the language of disgust and conquest. These women’s only power is that they won’t pretend to Richard, and so he humiliates them as viciously as possible. The only woman he doesn’t assault is Margaret, relic of the old regime; he can let her pass because she’s powerless. Vanessa Redgrave plays her transfixingly – ineffably quiet, her incongruous boilersuit marginalising her further among figures in business-like black.

Sher’s book Year of the King reports angsty rehearsal-room discussions about whether a disabled king could lead his troops in battle. However, the Leicester skeleton, with signs of trauma to the head, suggests that Richard was definitely, if defeatedly, in the thick of the action. Goold wisely forgoes sound-and-fury fight scenes for psychic payback around the gaping grave. Fiennes falls back in history: a warning of what happens when reality bites.

It’s the pale grey sweaters that are so creepy. Thin, tight, high necked, they cling to the performers’ bodies. They’re nubbled by nipple and you can practically count the ribs. And, within minutes of the two performers launching into the rancid domestic intensities and dance-lunge routines of I Heart Catherine Pistachio, a dark seep of sweat becomes visible. Rockpools under the armpits, rivulets down the torso, a saline lagoon lapping over the back.

Encounter’s two-person show – devised and directed by Jen Malarkey, which I saw at the Yard – is both easy and horrible to watch. Easy because it’s built of keenly observed comedy, tonguelash domestics, daft dance and nostalgic tunes. Horrible because these combine in a tale of vicious family dysfunction and sexual abuse.

Carl Harrison (taller, scathing, unabashed) trained in dance. Nick Blakeley (shorter, earnest, boxy) trained as an actor. Both fantastic. But for their specs, they’re identically dressed: baby blue nylon skirts, long yellow wigs roughly pulled into a ponytail. They play both Catherine – unloved, inappropriately loved – and her parents Linda and Lionel, needy swingers hoping their home may become the Playboy Mansion of their northern gated community. Emotionally, physically, sexually abused, we follow Catherine from birth to adulthood in just an hour.

The casting is genius, fold upon fold. Two Catherines, urging-restraining each other, clinging tight for comfort. When they play their parents, sniping at chairs at the back of the stage (Blakely-as-Lionel manspreading without conviction, Harrison-as-Linda twisted tight as a mamba), you’re left with a troubling disconnect. Has this pair of ordinary monsters created Catherine? Is she retrospectively performing her parents? Family dysfunction and dependency fold upon each other. The critic Maddy Costa likens the effect to Todd Solondz’ films, which is a sharp call. Linda and Lionel speak fluent Abigail’s Party, every brand-name line a giveaway of social climb and class shame. Ingratiating themselves into the community, whatever it takes – badger kink masks, using Catherine’s pony as a live piñata – they’d be pitiable if it wasn’t for the callous indifference with which they treat their daughter.

Frantic desire and rank discomfort

‘You’ll like Catherine Pistachio,’ someone told me last year. ‘It’s got dancing in it.’ To be honest, that wasn’t the draw – little is improved by the addition of contemporary dance, not even contemporary dance. But there’s a compulsion to the Catherines’ clunkingly committed routines – especially by thrashing, bendy Harrison, always with an expression of furious intent. Under movement director Simone Coxall, Catherine’s break for freedom in movement seems hobbled from the start – ramrod limbs, semi-coordinated voguing. As with the sweat, it signals bodies expressing themselves with frantic desire and rank discomfort.

The history of dance costume is a battle against visible perspiration. Breathable fabrics, detachable pit pads, the modern miracle of lycra. So why would they choose such vile costumes that advertise the performers’ clammy efforts?

They choose it because they want us to see that nasty sweat, of course. They want to make us wince a little, recoil a little. They do it because IHCP is a piece about bodies, the things they do and are made to do, the unease that accompanies them. The disgust, shame and coercion, made visible. There’s no wet wipe that can swab away that stain.

London’s my city. Always has been and (I hope) always will. I’m a grandchild of immigrants, and grandchild too of a rootless, vicious century which has played havoc with the idea of home. Home is where you are for now. Home is where you hope you’ll stay, but you don’t count on it.

I don’t suppose I’m the only person to keep a mental suitcase under the bed – if I had to, what would I take, where would I go? I’ve thought about it more since Britain’s Brexit referendum made London seem anomaly and licenced an ugly upsurge of racism. Voting against the grain of much of the country, in both the mayoral election and recent referendum, Londoners refused to be spooked by the perils of immigration: we live with it and we know it works. Live here for a year and you’re a Londoner; it’s a place to make yourself, to make a life – a world city that shows you the world.

In a big messy city full of strangers, you plot your own pathways. You find your patches – the bits to live, the bits to work and play. My London is inevitably plotted with theatres: you could write a history of what’s exciting in London theatre by my tube journeys – the way Hammersmith and Kennington have now been succeeded by Dalston and, surprisingly, placid Richmond.

It’s not just venues, but ventures that make a cultural life. One of the first projects to catch my attention as a young theatre goer was LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre). In a city that already has its hands full of delights, there is something about adding yet more to it that feels positively giddy. When, as often, LIFT shows slipped out of theatre buildings, they opened up the city to me, taking me to parks, offices, cemeteries that I’d never seen. Visitors brought their art, but their gift was also to help me inhabit my home.

In LIFT, the worldarrives to open our eyes – and we open our arms in return. You hope to be bowled over – yayYOUARENOWHERE – though it’s fine not to love everything (oh hello, Phaedra(s)). But the best treats are those that simply couldn’t be home grown, because they depend on a perspective we’re not privileged to own.

‘We have crossed the wide sea to come and see you’

The festival’s most arresting shows this year placed shared experience at their hearts. Minefield was an extraordinarily powerful emotional event – created by Lola Arias with both Argentine and British veterans of the 1982 Falklands conflict. Through letters and confessional monologues, dad rock and hokey karaoke, the six middle-aged men relived their former selves. They didn’t share a language or an ideology – but they share a history and a need to recuperate from it. That they did so together, on stage, in front of a mongrel London audience, was immensely moving. The silences in Minefield were profound, because both performers and spectators were working hard during them, thinking about what had brought these men together, and brought them to us.

Sometimes it’s enough for a culture to sashay into town with only a puppy dog eagerness to please. Lunatic loud and crazy colourful, Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker is a no-footnotes subcultural study of the superfans of Japanese pop stars. However bland the acts, their fans’ devotion is lung-bustingly wild. Director Toco Nikaido orchestrates a dizzying blare of costume changes, dance routines, songs in the key of shriek, and a hail of objects (water, toys, glitter, trash, seaweed and tofu) over the audience. We wear blue rain ponchos and a gobsmacked grin. Close your eyes to evade another bucket of water, and when you look up everyone’s dressed as a Russian doll, or in kitty masks. Flinch from flying beancurd, and they’ve changed again. At the end, we’re pulled up on stage, and the company of fans salutes us, before giving us a red carpet yelp as we leave. It’s bewildering, but delightful.

As Nikaido says, ‘we have crossed the wide sea to come and see you. Even though we have never met you, we are dying to meet you… take your hands and become friends.’ That’s how cities work. They get more than they give from their visitors. Retaining our open hearts is necessary work.